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... but fails horribly for me when simply trying to deploy an application.
To explain this I'll focus on my prefered distribution, debian.
Installing debian packages is simply, you get it from the standard repositories, or 3rdparty ones which laos relate to the current set of distributions (stable/testing/unstable). All dependencies *including* the C based APIs that might be required are resolved and simply installed (without asking a million questions, yes I know you can turn it off, but it's hard to find

Tests are certainly necessary to run on every system for which the configuration is not a priori known.

OS vendor package repositories circumvent this by saying “any package in this set of packages is known with a certain degree of confidence to play well well with any other package within the same set”. This is what release engineering is about: working out which set of packages works together stably.

The CPAN has no provisions for any stable set of particular distributions. Instead, anything tha

The CP5.6.2AN is a brilliant idea that could provide a lot of feedback to CPAN uploaders as well as CPAN users. I could imagine a useful subscription service that bundled together dependencies which tested successfully on a given platform.

What I really like about Debian testing is that it's already here.:-) It has plenty of maintainers that are already watching over about the modules. There is already bug-tracing tool for the packaged versions. Also another nice thing about packaging is that it is easy to include patches to the original source. For example Perl 5.10.0 it self has 22 packaging releases and includes 58 fixes patches (you can see which http://patch-tracking.debian.net/package/perl/5.10.0-22 [debian.net] search for "fixes/"). For a private repository everyone is fee to add patches to the Perl modules he needs when he needs and not wait for module author to accept it + release it.

Thing is, with good-quality test suites (which Debian mostly lacks), you can automate much of the release engineering process. That’s part of a possible extrapolation from David’s post: a system whereby a new release automatically becomes part of the testing package set if it passes not only its own test suite against when running against the rest of testing, but with it installed, all of its (immediate and indirect) dependents within testing also pass theirs. That way you could get a “rol